Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the fourth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.
After 14 weeks, the Democratic primaries seem “like a good movie that’s gone on for about half-an-hour too long,” as Barack Obama allowed recently. Even the slow crawl of weeks between the last and next contest has begun feeling like a Golgotha trek. So perhaps it’s natural that, with Pennsylvania now just nine days off, many commentators have fallen to squaring the usual hype about it being the “decisive” state.
If, they say, Obama wins Pennsylvania—confounding all but one recent poll—that’ll be that: not even the Clintons will have the brass to continue their doomed campaign. And even if they did, enough of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates would announce for Obama at that point to take him across the finish line, 2024 delegates. If, on the other hand, Clinton beats Obama by 15 points or more—again confounding all but one recent poll—she will significantly narrow his lead in the popular vote, and gain sufficient momentum to have a shot at ‘running the table’ thereafter. Or at least of upsetting Obama in North Carolina on May 6, which for her would be the next best thing.
So say the pundits, and they’re probably right. Only, neither scenario seems likely.
Pennsylvania is the heart of the Democratic Party machine—a machine still largely controlled by Bill Clinton—and nearly all of the party’s senior state and federal functionaries there are actively supporting Hillary. Pennsylvania’s African-Americans and educated whites are both concentrated in and around Philadelphia, and to a lesser extent Pittsburgh. Most of the rest of the state is economically depressed factory and farmland, the province mainly of ‘po’whites’—all of which makes Pennsylvania demographically similar to Ohio, where six weeks ago a ten-point win by Clinton was widely seen as saving her campaign.
Now, exit polls have shown that, second only to women over 60, these ‘Reagan’ or ‘Blue-collar Democrats’ have comprised the demographic most resistant to Obama; and in fact a poll on Thursday showed that, while Obama was catching Clinton with most groups, whites in Pennsylvania earning under $50,000 a year were polling for her by a resounding 55 to 22.
In the New York Times of April 4 (‘In ex-steel city, voters deny race plays a role’), Paul Vitello, a reporter on the ground, wryly remarked the apparent need of white working-class Pennsylvanians to explain their vote against the black candidate. “‘I don’t say this because he’s black, but the guy just seems arrogant to me,’ said Harry Brobst, a truck driver,” Vitello reported; and he added that “when dismissing Mr Obama, voters in this former steel centre, whatever their racial feelings, seem almost compelled to list their reasons, if only to pre-empt the unspoken race question.”
Because he voted “present” too often as an Illinois state senator; because he speaks very well, but has not talked about reviving the coal industry; because he would not command the respect of the military; because there is something unsettling about his perfect calm, they say. Most West Indians will have no trouble interpreting such equivocations. ‘Never ever!’ is what they mean, of course. These are the Democrats who have been vowing to vote for McCain if Obama is their party’s nominee, and their presence in force in Pennsylvania is a powerful buttress to Hillary’s fortunes there.
Then, what does the Golden Boy have going for him in this last bastion of old America? Well, mainly himself: youth, charisma, and—insufficiently remarked, until very recently—a political IQ that has run rings around the much-ballyhooed Clinton machine for the past year; all these, and money—limitless infusions of small-donor money.
So, in the wake of Obama’s six-day bus tour across the state; his endorsement by Pennsylvania’s popular senator Bob Casey; a highly effective, hour-long appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’s Campus Tour’ with host Chris Matthews; and a series of unexpectedly enthusiastic rallies—including some held in unlikely hick towns—the polls have been shortening. Clinton’s 16-percentage-point lead in mid-February had slid to 12 points by mid-March, then to nine points by April 2. Last week’s polls had her leading Obama by just 5 to 8 points.
(Regarding those rallies: last Wednesday, an Obama supporter and contributor to the liberal blog Daily Kos reported (‘Levittown lovin’ Obama – seriously!’ by Speck Tater): “I have been writing with some pessimism and dismay regarding Obama’s chances in Levittown, PA. Would the people of Levittown actually attend an Obama town hall? Would people picket and wave ugly signs? But then Obama arrived and the place exploded in cheers and applause. People were chanting and there was electricity in the air. It was just like everybody else had said. Amazing!”
Even more persuasive than Ms Tater’s admittedly partial account were the accompanying photos. They showed the waiting, would-be audience of Reagan Democrats: a pavement-wide column of people snaking away down the street for block after block.
Admittedly, Obama’s had some help of late from a sudden surge of Clinton gaffes and setbacks, the signs perhaps of an increasingly exhausted candidate.
First, there was Hillary’s sniper-fire story, vividly exposed as a self-dramatizing lie by a video of her placid arrival in Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1996. Then the Clintons’ tax returns revealed they had earned more than $100 million in the eight years since Bill demitted the presidency: a fat-cat image that’s unlikely to endear them to a white Pennsylvania hinterland in increasingly desperate financial straits.
Then news broke that chief Clinton advisor and pollster Mark Penn had been moonlighting as a lobbyist in support of Colombia’s pending free trade agreement with the US—this, in a rust belt state that sees free trade agreements as being responsible for the disastrous migration of US jobs overseas.
And then last Thursday there were Bill Clinton’s revisionist misstatements about Hillary’s Bosnia adventure—doubly astonishing since they were demonstrably untrue and revived the Bosnia story after it appeared to have died.
“Hillary,” Clinton told an Indiana audience, “one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995.”
Bloggers and television talking heads alike jumped to point out that Hillary (a) had told her sniper-fire story not once but four times, over a span of three months (b) hadn’t disowned it until several days after the disproving video surfaced, and (c) had visited Bosnia in ’96, not ’95, a consequential difference, since by ’96 the war was over.
The question is whether all this, the Obama ‘magic’ and the Clinton setbacks between them, will be enough to persuade sufficient of Pennsylvania’s economically-hurting, white working class voters to vote for a black man to give Obama a chance of winning the state. Primary by primary and caucus by caucus, these Democratic contests have provided the watching world with (often startling) snapshots of how, where, and to what extent the bad old America has been changing of late. Pennsylvania will give us a fair sense of just how weak—or how strong—the remaining walls of Babylon are.
